


follow me into the endless night

by mjolnirbreaker



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Post-Black Panther (2018), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), brother & sister bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 18:20:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15273492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjolnirbreaker/pseuds/mjolnirbreaker
Summary: “I hurt T’Challa.” Shuri finally says, her voice so hoarse she barely recognizes it. “Not directly and I didn’t mean to, obviously. But I did. I just--I hurt someone who I’ve only ever wanted to keep safe.”Bucky looks at her with his small smile, but it’s soaked with melancholy. His eyes are both fixed on her and fixed on something far away at the same time. She wonders if he’s even seeing her.“Yeah kid,” he says, “me too.”





	follow me into the endless night

Shuri has lost her confidant. 

Maybe it’s a selfish thing to worry about. After all, T’Challa becoming king has not been the coronation either of them expected. To be a king is to be fatherless, and of course they’ve always known this, but to be fatherless this young is jarring. 

And try to name another king who was thrown from a waterfall within a week of their coronation. Shuri can’t. 

So her foremost concern should be T’Challa. He seems to be doing alright, but occasionally her beads will display a light blue notification informing her that T’Challa’s heart rate has spiked suddenly. And then she dashes to the lab and pulls up his suit’s entire status board only to find that he isn’t _in_ the suit at all—only wearing the necklace for whatever reason--and that he isn’t on any mission that would induce an irregular pulse. He’s just asleep. 

Awake, he’s alright. He’s running things well and meeting with Avengers and being broadcasted on every television in the world as he reveals what Wakanda has been protecting this entire time. Shuri goes back and forth on the policy daily. Sometimes her thoughts are narrated by T’Challa himself, sometimes Nakia. 

The thing is, T’Challa is her best friend. He always has been. And he’s always been the first person she confides in when any problem weighs her down, and he always locks up her secrets among his own and protects them both. But now? Now she can’t possibly unload every weight she carries onto T’Challa when he’s already carrying the weight of Wakanda. His legs will buckle. 

What Shuri needs is pretty simple. She needs a friend. A very specific type of friend, though, someone who isn’t intertwined into the carefully knit life of her family and someone who won’t be burdened by her several emotions. The main problem she runs into when making friends is that they either don’t believe she is ever justified in feeling any sort of negative emotions--because she is a princess and things _must_ be perfect and easy for her at all times--or they sell away her secrets for the acclaim of knowing that princess Shuri thinks ceremonial traditions are boring. How nice it would be to have a blank slate of a person, someone who doesn’t know a thing about her.

“James Barnes is finished with his primary evaluation?” T’Challa asks, even though Shuri just handed him a file which announces in bold ink that James Barnes is finished with his primary evaluation. It is always like this when he comes barging into the lab. She delivers the updated information to him, and he always fixates on one particular bit to question. “That was fast. Considering--”

“Considering he was just a popsicle?” Shuri finishes. T’Challa makes a face at her phrasing, but she isn’t deterred from pulling him by the arm to her main desk. “Yes, very. I was wondering why that might be and the obvious first hypothesis is that his body may have some sort of resistance based on the multiple instances of total comatose--”

“Obviously.” T’Challa echoes with a smirk. He’s looking at the edge to edge wall of information covering her screen with his usual concentration. 

“--but I also believe that it may have something to do with his altered abilities. Did you know that his resting heart rate can drop as low as fifteen beats per minute? That is well below the recorded lowest and it could even go lower with other variables at play.”

“I am going to stop you right there.” T’Challa’s playful smirk is replaced with his stern face faster than Shuri can begin to protest. “Barnes is here to _recover._ I gave Steve Rogers my word that Wakanda will provide him a safe place to do that. He is not an experiment.”

“I never said--”

“You do not talk about variables without a plan to _test_ those variables. Promise me.” 

This is another thing that has changed recently. T’Challa has always bossed her around, but never before has he done it out of obligations he has to the throne, or to Captain America. And she can tell from the way his lips are pressed together that he doesn’t want to be doing this. It messes with the balance of their relationship because being bossy isn’t as fun when it’s a matter of national responsibility. 

“I promise, fine.” She watches his face relax and feels it’s alright to add, “But you want me to do _something_ else with him. You set him up on a direct frequency to my lab.” 

“That is just a precaution. He will be staying on land near W’Kabi’s village and he insisted on relying on the crops for food. But if he needs anything,” T’Challa reaches out to tap her Kimoyo beads, “you will be there.” 

“He wants to grow his own food? Does he know we have enough food? Did you ever tell him?” 

“I told him.” T’Challa rolls his eyes. “He is very particular about certain things. We also offered him the arm you prepared, and he did not want that either.”

Shuri shrugs. Ulysses Klaue went to great lengths for an arm sculpted with vibranium, so maybe James Barnes’ rejection of one is a good sign. Either way, she can recycle the arm for something else. Recently she’s been mulling over ideas for how to best incorporate vibranium into technology that can be distributed to the rest of the world, per T’Challa’s orders. Prosthetics may be the perfect starting point--a necessity that can be greatly improved with Shuri’s technology. 

“Is that all you came to talk about?” Shuri asks, hoping it isn’t. T’Challa is now fixated on his own Kimoyo beads and whatever they’re projecting for him. “I know you’re busy but--”

“I have to go.” He says at the same time. He looks up again and grins at her, but she can see the stress already setting back in, like he’s remembering for the first time in the last five minutes that he is the king. He really is. “Do not even worry about Barnes. I doubt you will hear from him at all.”

“Maybe I will. Maybe the White Wolf will get--”

“Shuri,” T’Challa drops his smile and holds up a hand, pointing a finger in the way that’s always irritated her, “do not call him that to his face. I don’t know where that came from but do _not--”_

“I don’t!” Shuri swats his finger out of her face. He allows it, but keeps his face just as stern. “I have and always will call him Sergeant Barnes. I wouldn’t call Bruce Banner the Hulk, I wasn’t raised in the _jungle,_ T’Challa.”

“Did nobody ever tell you that we found you in the jungle?” T’Challa asks, tone so serious that he manages to trick her brain for a second. By the half second later that she realizes he’s kidding, she’s lost her window of opportunity to shut him down. “Oh, Shuri, I’m so sorry you had to find out this way.”

“Get out of my lab.”

“Baba found you. We think you were being raised by the lions.”

“You are so _annoying_ and now you’re wasting time I could be using for _science!”_

“You are still my sister.” T’Challa says solemnly while he reaches for her hand and she plants her entire body weight into his side, shoving incessantly until he relents and moves toward the door. She can hear his laughter all the way down the hall. 

This is good and manageable. As long as she is still his sister and not his citizen, she’ll be able to handle it. She can stomach losing T’Challa’s emotional support, but she couldn’t survive without his jokes and his teasing and everything that makes him himself. She had voiced this concern only once, to Okoye, and her answer hadn’t resolved the anxiety that’d been looming since someone detonated that bomb in Vienna. 

“Your father was king,” Okoye had reasoned, “and he still treated you like his daughter, not his citizen.”

“But he had so much time as king before I was even born.” Shuri responded. “Maybe at the beginning he didn’t know how to balance it all. And maybe T’Challa won’t.”

To which Okoye had answered, with a faint smile, “T’Challa could balance the entire universe without dropping a single star.”

Right now Shuri is shutting down the lab, following the safety procedures she knows by heart and turning off the lights. On the way back to her own bedroom she passes T’Challa’s old room, which is now the refuge for all not-king-enough belongings he still secretly loves, including the stuffed elephant he’s had since childhood. The room is bare and looking at it injects melancholy into her blood. So she closes the door tight, unsure of how it got opened in the first place, and pads down the hall to collapse in her awaiting bed. It isn’t until twenty minutes later that she musters the energy to get up once more and actually prepare for bed, and it isn’t until nearly an hour after _that_ that she manages to fall asleep. 

And then at about three in the morning, her Kimoyo beads begin to vibrate in a synchronized frenzy. It takes Shuri’s unconscious mind a second to register the tingling sensation on her left wrist and by the time she’s awake, the vibrating only increases in speed. Which means whatever emergency is happening is only getting worse, not better. 

Blinking in the dim light, she sits up halfway and squeezes a bead at random until it projects the familiar image of someone’s vitals. _T’Challa,_ it has to be T’Challa, he just left for what could very well be a mission and he could be--

Shuri’s inner alarm shuts off the moment she notices where the blip on the map is located. There are two reasons, she knows after starting at the projection for another minute, that these vitals do not belong to T’Challa. The first is because his name is obviously in the system and would be displayed at the top in bold block letters, and this person’s name is not shown. And the second is because the map is pulsing blue right over the village she recognizes as W’Kabi’s. 

The only person there who also happens to be wired to her frequency and is new enough to not have a name in the system is clearly Sergeant Barnes. Which means it’s Sergeant Barnes’ heart that is currently pumping at a high enough rate to qualify as a medical emergency. And it is _definitely_ some sort of emergency because his heart rate is an alarming two hundred and forty beats per minute. 

But it’s slowing down. The vibration of her beads match the beats per minute as it gradually drops, at first by single digits and then by doubles. Shuri can already guess what happened, just based on watching T’Challa’s heart rate do the exact same trick for the past weeks. Still, T’Challa’s had never gotten quite that high.

She should be springing out of bed right now and sprinting down the hall. Grabbing medical staff and maybe Okoye or another Dora Milaje just in case. But Shuri can easily put herself in the position of Barnes right now and imagine the alarm he’d feel at a full team of Wakandans arriving because of one nightmare. 

She can also imagine Barnes laying there in some stage of cardiac arrest, though. Because what if it isn’t a nightmare, but some sort of medical emergency that isn’t coming through on her Kimoyo beads because she silenced the notification before even really thinking it through? And what if she has to live with the guilt of killing the White Wolf forever because she made an assumption?

Shuri gets up and grabs her shoes. 

 

The beads tell her to take a right turn, and suddenly she’s faced with a hut that she swears wasn’t here the last time she visited this village. It could very well be a new addition, based on its smaller size and diagonally thatched roof that doesn’t match the surrounding huts. This one doesn’t even have a proper door, but a curtain that rolls along with the late breeze. 

Shuri waits outside for a moment, considering. She can hear movement in the hut, can see the glow of a candle emanating from the small gap between the curtain’s bottom and the dirt. Clearly Barnes is not dead. Maybe the considerate thing to do is turn around and begin the walk back. Overhead the stars glitter and from all sides the crickets chirp. Shuri stands there, stuck, for almost five minutes before impulsively knocking her fist against the hut’s opening frame. 

Barnes answers quickly. Not really answers, actually, but yanks the curtain back and stares at her with surprise for a few seconds. There are no greeting and salutations. Shuri is not sure if this is Barnes’ nature, or if he’s just surprised to see a seventeen year old visitor in her pajamas in the middle of the night. 

“Shuri?” He says finally. His right hand--the only one he’s got--is still holding the curtain back for her as she lingers in the doorway. 

“Yes. You know me?” 

“Your brother told me all about you. Showed me a picture.”

The thought of that is ridiculous. T’Challa pulling up a picture of Shuri when talking about her to strangers, as if they need a visual aid, it’s incredibly extra. It makes him feel less far away. 

Shuri realizes abruptly that she’s just standing here, in Barnes’ temporary home, in her pajamas, in the middle of the night, and she has yet to offer any sort of explanation. He doesn’t ask, though, just stands there holding the curtain for her and waiting patiently. 

“I was alerted about your heart rate.” She tells him finally. “So I came to check that everything was alright.”

Barnes closes his eyes for a brief second, the way Okoye does when she’s asking Bast to grant her patience and restraint when dealing with nonsense. It isn’t exactly like that, though, because Shuri doesn’t get the feeling that Barnes is angry with her. He seems angry with himself, which is supported by the look of remorse he gives her when his eyes are open again. 

“I was dreaming.” He explains. “I’m sorry I woke you up. Maybe you should just disconnect me from the bead things or else this might happen again.”

“But then we wouldn’t know if you had a medical emergency.”

Barnes merely shrugs at this, abruptly moving his eyes from her to over her shoulder, staring out into the darkness like he’s looking for something. Shuri is acutely aware that she’s never felt so uncomfortable in her life. It seems like a good time to leave. 

“You made that arm, right? The one they offered me.” Barnes says this while still looking off into the distance. Shuri glances at his left side and notices that he still wears the small bit of black fabric that’s been stretched over his shoulder since he went into cryo. “It was nice.”

Shuri is accustomed to people complimenting her work. It fills her with pride every time, regardless of how often it happens or how simple the praise. For some reason, a compliment coming from Barnes seems a little more special, a little more rare. 

“It could’ve been better,” she says and he finally looks back at her, this time with eyebrows raised just slightly, “I made it for combat. But I think you would prefer one that functions for everyday life instead.”

“Combat and everyday life have been the same thing for awhile now.”

“It doesn't have to be.” Shuri says. She knows that maybe this isn’t her business. Just a month ago, she’d read up on James Buchanan Barnes while news reports played in the background, reporting her father’s death and pointing the blame on this man she’d never before heard of but now hated with all her heart. A burning sort of hatred had filled Shuri as she read the Hydra files that Black Widow had revealed to the public, all of which outlined Barnes as the prized murderer of a whole organization of murderers. She’d thought that hatred could never go away. 

Even when it was reported that Barnes wasn’t the one who killed her father, she still hated him. Being absolved of one murder out of many cleans only a fraction of the blood on Barnes’ hands, she’d figured. 

Predictably, T’Challa had been the one to sit with her the night before Barnes arrived in Wakanda and explain everything that needed explaining. The mind control, the torture, the whole horrible story had washed the rest of the blood away and Shuri saw clearly that the man she’d begged Bast to strike down was as innocent as Baba had been. 

But does Barnes see it that way? Is he aware of his own innocence? The circles under his eyes, darker than the night he stares out into, indicate that he is not.

If T’Challa were here to boss her around, he’d say that it’s time to walk back home and stop bothering Barnes. But T’Challa is busy bothering other people around right now, and Barnes does not look particularly bothered. In fact, he’s smiling just a little bit. The littlest bit physically possible, but still. 

“We won’t make you fight here.” She tells him earnestly, hoping he believes her. “You can just live.”

His barely perceptible smile hangs on, but the way his jaw tightens makes it more wistful than amused. “We’ll see.”

Now is a good time to leave, she senses. There have been plenty of good times to leave, actually, but now seems like the best. She takes a half step back to go, forcing herself to look directly into his eyes when she says, “Let us know if you need anything, Sergeant Barnes.”

“Bucky.” He says just as she turns to leave. She looks back over her shoulder at where he’s moved back inside his hut, his back turned to her. 

“I’m sorry?”

“Just call me Bucky, kid.”

“Yeah, alright. Good night, Bucky.”

She leaves before she can hear his response, if he even gives one. And for whatever reason the walk back home seems shorter. 

 

Her beads don’t go off again. This means that Bucky either hasn’t had any more problems over the last two days, or he took his own beads off. Hypothetically, she could just check and see if his vitals come up when she opens his status, but she doesn’t. It’s always kinda felt like spying to check on someone who isn’t in any danger. 

And he definitely isn’t in danger. No one is, really. Not even T’Challa, apparently, because he switched from Black Panther to King T’Challa, graceful diplomat, just this morning as he starts his first day of many making amendments to the Sokovia Accords. Shuri knows there are a lot of complex politics centered around this particular document, but truthfully she’s never been interested in politics. 

“It’s the science of people.” T’Challa had said once, and she’d rolled her eyes. That’s sociology. 

Even if she was interested in politics, she probably wouldn’t want to get anywhere near the mess that is the Sokovia Accords. T’Challa was sparing on the details, but Shuri knows, as any person with Internet access, that the Avengers’ fight was much more catastrophic than anyone could have foreseen. Maybe that’s why the document needs amending in the first place. 

Honestly, maybe she’d take sitting at a glossy table with national diplomats at either side than what she’s currently doing now, which is nothing. Her lab has been in various states of disrepair since an attack jet had shot right through it, and though she tries to insist on working without air conditioning, her mother vetoed that. So every few days she has to leave her work and allow the construction to fix little things like burst pipes or exposed wiring. Things that Shuri could work around, if she was allowed to. 

She’s been working on the outreach position that T’Challa assigned her to, but currently there isn’t much to be done until she can finish her everyday use prosthetic prototype she’s been assembling, which again is dependant on the lab. 

Sometimes, especially recently with her irregular work schedule and T’Challa’s constant responsibility, Shuri feels--useless. Which is stupid, anyone else would say, because her technology is cutting edge and innovative and et cetera. But while T’Challa is out being a literal superhero and king, and Okoye is leading an army, and Nakia is saving lives, Shuri is sitting in a lab. And sometimes she’s sitting in her bedroom. 

Recently the necessary trial and error aspect of science has been frustrating. This is definitely a new advancement in her personality, because before when inventions would catch fire she’d get excited about the prospect of finding what went wrong and fixing it. But now, every time something catches fire she can’t help but focus on the _mistake_ aspect of fixing mistakes. Every single second that she isn’t making something new feels like wasted time. 

Shuri sits on her bed, thinking about all of this and just generally feeling like she’s going to scream if she has to hear the whirring of drills from her lab that she can’t be in. She needs someone to explain all this to, but she knows that any amount of venting will always produce the same responses. 

_“But your work is helping Wakanda every day!”_

She knows that. Her brain understands the concept and accepts it, but her emotions and frustrations soldier on despite all logic and she just needs someone who will listen and nod their head. But in order for that to happen, she needs someone who doesn’t know much about her work in the first place.

The walk to Bucky’s hut is hot. She brings two water bottles with her, and one is already emptied by the time she arrives. This time when Bucky draws back the curtain, things are noticeably more average. For one thing they are now both fully awake and not wearing pajamas, which definitely helps the mood feel less dire. 

Still, he’s looking at her with resigned caution and the first thing he says is, “What’s going on?”

“Nothing bad.” Shuri assures him. She doesn’t even know what to say. Her reason for coming seems stupid now, in comparison to the serious reason Bucky seemed to be expecting. “I--”

“You look stressed out, you know that?” He interrupts before she can even force an explanation. He releases the curtain this time and Shuri darts forward, into his makeshift home, to avoid being closed out in what feels like the middle of a conversation. She chooses to linger by the door in case she’s misread this, but he looks back at her from where he’s now settling by his kitchen table and waves a hand in her direction. “You can eat if you want. I’ve never really farmed before but there was already so much growing and all I had to do was harvest it.”

Shuri shrugs and approaches the several baskets of freshly picked fruits and vegetables that he has sitting on the counter. Some still have traces of the earth clinging to their scraggly roots, but some are freshly washed and glistening with water. Shuri counts nearly three baskets of just carrots. 

“That’s a lot of carrots.”

“They’re good,” he says almost defensively, “and they’re good for your eyesight. I bet you already know that, huh? Science prodigy.”

She grabs a carrot and sits across from him. For some reason, in the light of day, this does not seem nearly as uncomfortable as before. She can actually look him in the eyes now, and though he’s still the same with his shadows and missing arm, it isn’t like having a conversation with a mythical figure anymore. 

A mythical figure definitely wouldn’t live like this. His bed is unmade, his walls lined with the boxes of crop he’s apparently harvested between now and last night. The only personal items appear to be clothes and a small, leatherbound journal that she can see sitting on the edge of his mattress. If Bucky notices her evaluating his home, he doesn’t seem to mind. He just works on his own carrot and looks pensively toward the door, waiting for her to speak again. 

“I can’t be in my lab right now.” She explains. He looks back at her, possibly to indicate that he’s listening. “And when I can’t work on anything I just feel…”

“Restless?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” 

“I know people who are the exact same way.” Bucky’s lips quirk back into his now familiar and microscopic grin. “You’re a teenager, right? When I was your age, work was the last thing I wanted to do.”

“Weren’t you in a war when you were my age?” Shuri asks. She immediately regrets it, bringing up the war and the fact that he was no doubt traumatized by it at a young age. But Bucky laughs, kind of, exhales enough air that she chooses to qualify it as a laugh. 

“Sure, but I was still a kid. I had to run twenty laps around base camp for flinging a spoonful of rations at a cadet.” He gives her a sudden warning look and adds, “I’m not encouraging you to throw food at me.”

She laughs a little. It feels good. 

“It never feels right to _not_ be working.” She says, slipping her gaze away because now he’s steadily looking at her and it suddenly feels strange. Though she’s fantasized about having someone brand new to talk to, she never factored in the fact that talking about herself has always sort of made her uncomfortable. With T’Challa, it didn’t count, because he’s known her forever. T’Challa knows that her work ethic is just part of who she is, a trait encoded in her DNA. Bucky is looking at her with almost...concern. Maybe because he comes from a place where teenagers’ potential is locked within them, where no one in their right mind would let anyone other than a wealthy old man touch their technology, so he thinks she’s somehow being forced into working and has a case of Stockholm Syndrome with her lab. 

“Gotta take time for yourself.”

“Being in the lab _is_ my time for myself.”

“Oh.” His furrowed brow relaxes and he takes another bite of the carrot, nodding to himself a little bit. “It’s not a job to you, it’s your _thing.”_

“Right.”

“You just need something to do.”

“I guess.”

Bucky stands then, walks over to his makeshift kitchen and washes his hands in the basin. Shuri watches him kneel down to the cabinet below and tug a sack of something out, which he brings over to where she sits and sets it at her feet before going to get another. 

“What is this?” The bag is filled to the stitches with some sort of orange-ish grain, thinner than popcorn kernels but roughly the same length. When she gets no response, she looks back up at Bucky who has a second sack of identical filling in the crook of his arm and a tin watering can in his hand. 

“For the chickens.” He answers, jerking his head in the direction of the door and leading the way out. Shuri tries lifting the bag, but after a few seconds of straining to keep it off the ground she settles on just dragging it behind her as she makes her way out behind him. 

She is glad she wore old sneakers. Bucky is standing directly in the center of a mud puddle, a product of the brief storm they had the night before, and he looks at her expectantly as he waits for her to join him. And she does it, because this is something she has never done before so maybe it’ll be enjoyable, plus Bucky seems to have a plan. 

The mud quickly suctions itself to the soles of her shoes and Bucky smirks at the noise she makes. When she looks up, she sees the enclosed area that they stand just outside of, containing at least fifteen chickens that are slowly flocking towards Bucky and Shuri because they must internally know what time it is. 

“You take a little bit in your hand,” Bucky demonstrates by grabbing a handful of grain and then dumping some back in until it just fills the center of his palm, “and try to spread it out so they don’t all go for the same spots.”

It’s easy. Not that Shuri expected feeding chickens to be difficult or anything, but it’s almost soothing how easy it is. Throw some food at them. Sustain them without complication, watch them gratefully peck up every bit and then look back up at her for more. She likes it. 

She also likes shoving bales of hay over for the sheep and filling up the water basin for the cows and even doesn’t mind the way Bucky laughed when she picked up what was apparently a radish and asked what it was. Afterwards they go back inside and she sits on the floor, sweating and feeling like she needs to wash her hands at least ten times, but she feels good. 

“Took your mind off things, right?” Bucky asks while he rinses the radishes. He’d pinned the door curtain aside so the evening breeze can enter the hut and Shuri can see the sun slowly slipping behind the treeline. She should go back soon probably.

“Yes. You do all of that every day?”

“Sometimes more. Depends on what they need.” Bucky nudges her shoulder and she looks up at him from her spot on the ground. He’s holding out a radish, which she takes and inspects with suspicion. “Kid it isn’t going to _poison_ you.”

“I’ve had radish before!” She insists. “Just never like, a whole one. Never raw.”

Bucky scoffs and goes back to the kitchen, returning a second later to settle down on the floor across from her with his own radish in his hand. He bites into it without hesitating, then gives her a thumbs up which juxtaposes his entire self in a way that Shuri finds both hilarious and comforting. This man who she’d first thought was a soulless killer, then a detached shell, then a reclusive hermit, is really not all that different from anyone else she knows. Sure, sometimes he goes stretches of time without saying much and he’s always looking around like someone is hiding in the forest to come running at him with a spear, but he also took her into his farm and taught her how to work it, caught her by the arm when she’d tripped over a divet in the ground. 

And he hasn’t once mentioned that she’s the princess, that she’s the sister of the Black Panther, cthat she’s going to leave his hut soon and walk back to a bedroom that’s quadruple the size. He doesn’t really seem to care. 

She bites into the radish. It takes a second for her teeth to sink in, and once she has a bite she realizes that it’s strangely familiar. The mild tang brings to the forefront a memory of this taste somewhere else, and for a full minute she chews and contemplates before she can place it. There was a couscous recipe that Mama used to prepare and radishes had been intermixed, always diced into cubes that were packed with flavor. The taste makes her think of home, makes her think of times when she was smaller and she didn’t have to worry about making the right tech and what might happen to T’Challa if she doesn’t.

“Good?” Bucky asks. 

“Yes,” she says both of the taste and the feeling in her chest, “really good.”

 

“So then the problem is how to maintain efficiency while also keep the key aspects of old models. Like, if every prototype has to look relatively similar to the original there’s only so much I can do to keep advancing it within those restrictions.”

Bucky looks at her over the sheep’s back, his face thoughtful. “Why does it have to look the same?”

Shuri clips a tuft of the sheep’s hair that has a burr entangled in it and drops it in the bucket at her feet. “The Black Panther suit is a part of Wakanda’s history, I cannot alter it. It would be like if someone painted the White House pink.”

Bucky runs the shear down the last strip of fleece and Shuri catches as much as she can before it falls to the tarp beneath them. “The White House doesn’t have as much significance. Just made to show off.”

Shuri laughs. She likes hearing Bucky’s commentary on his country, mostly because it so strongly opposes what she always hears about America on the internet. She gets the sense that Bucky is a realist about everything, not one to hate or love something without good reason. Her image of America is getting a bit clearer the more she hears him talk about it. 

It’s been two weeks and now Shuri visits Bucky most every evening. Now that her lab is officially and finally completed, she spends her days working and her nights...working. But she doesn’t mind either type of work, because the lab is rewarding and familiar while the farm is therapeutic and comforting. 

The animals are accustomed to her now, according to Bucky, and he’s going to let her name the calf that’ll be born soon from the cow he’d named Delores. Shuri thinks she’s noticing little changes in Bucky, shifts like the gradual movements of tectonic plates. For one thing, the amount of time he’s spent looking around in guarded apprehension has dwindled. He laughs a bit more, though only when she’s really earned it with a killer comeback, and for the first time ever a few nights ago, he’d even let himself complain about something. 

“It’s too hot.” He’d said. To anyone else this would seem both a true and mundane statement, but Shuri knows that Bucky never complains. It just isn’t a part he plays. Of course he’d followed it up with a glance in her direction and, “That doesn’t mean you need to run and build an air conditioner.”

Still. Shuri thinks that’s progress.

“That one chicken over there,” she points at the chicken on the other side of the enclosure, the only one who never flocks over with the rest for feeding, “might have brain damage. Sometimes I see it walking into the fence.”

“Oh you mean Sam?” Bucky smiles and tosses another handful of grain, making it shower over Sam the chicken. They watch him peck aimlessly at the ground, only occasionally hitting the kernels. “Definitely.”

Sometimes Shuri feels like she’s on the outside of an inside joke, but she doesn’t know who the other people, apart from Bucky, are on the inside. One thing she’s sure of is that Bucky has never mentioned Steve Rogers to her, despite the fact that T’Challa described their relationship as one of endless devotion. But it’s understandable. Maybe talking about someone across the globe is painful for Bucky, unlike Shuri who talks about T’Challa at every given opportunity. 

“So what are you going to do?” Bucky asks while they walk back to the hut. “About the suit.”

“I haven’t updated it in awhile. I’ve been working on projects for the outreach center.”

“You know you don’t have to help me here every night. You can skip if you need to stay in your lab.”

“I know. It just--” Shuri feels her Kimoyo beads vibrate on her wrist. She ignores it for a second, assuming it’s just Nakia responding to her text, before she realizes that it’s vibration is not staggered like usual but instead one endless buzz. 

She stops dead in her tracks. Bucky stops a few steps ahead of her after realizing that she’s no longer by his side. In her periphery she can see him looking back but for the moment all attention is focused on the beads as they bring up a projection which reads to her:

 **BP SUIT MODEL #A8 COMPROMISED. BULLET PUNCTURE ON LEFT SIDE OF ABDOMEN.**

Shuri runs. There isn’t time to explain things to Bucky, who she can hear yell something after her as she runs past the hut and through the gate and up the trail. She can’t _think_ about anything else other than T’Challa and how she doesn’t even know where he is right now, she hasn’t been keeping up with where he is every day and _how could there be a bullet puncture the suit is fucking bulletproof!_

She runs faster than she knew she could. Her flimsy farm work shoes, coated in mud from consecutive evenings slap against the ground as she sprints home as fast as her mind is working until she gets to the lab, tears the door open and throws herself into her desk chair. Her heart is pounding, her Kimoyo beads still pulsing, and with shaking hands she pulls up T’Challa’s vitals. 

Minor blood loss. Steady pulse. High pain readings but overall, steady vitals. 

But she needs to hear his voice. She doesn’t care if he’s in the middle of battle--well yes she does because what if he’s distracted and he gets shot again somehow, what if--

The screen blinks with an incoming call. Shuri scrubs a fist against her eyes and clicks to answer, and Okoye’s face fills up her screen. 

“ _Yeka,_ Shuri. Do not cry.”

Being told not to cry always makes her cry more for whatever reason. She ducks her head a little so Okoye can’t see that. “Is he--”

“He is fine. It was just a graze on his hip, did not even slow him down. It is already being fixed.” 

“I don’t _understand._ The suit is bulletproof, there’s no type of bullet on the planet that should be able to hurt him. I have changed the suits but I’ve never taken that away, why would I? Okoye--”

“It went through the belt.” Okoye tells her firmly. Shuri looks back up at the screen with the feeling that her heart is sinking into the planet’s core. She appreciates that Okoye didn’t say it with softness, with pity, just stating the fact of what happened. 

Shuri had added a belt to the latest suit. Not even technically a belt, because it didn’t wrap over the suit. It was a thin strip of vibranium, altered to send pulses through the suit when it sensed incoming obstructions. Up to twenty feet. She’d been so proud of it, so thrilled when he reported back that it worked perfectly. 

A day later she’d realized that the belt’s size didn’t quite match up to the amount of vibranium she’d taken out of the suit to make room for it. So there was about a half-inch line on T’Challa’s suit that was just base fabric, no vibranium.

Shuri brings up the status of the suit. There’s a red dot right there, right on the half-inch.

“It’s my fault.” She mutters, because it is. No getting around it, it’s her fault. Even if he’s fine, even if it never happens again (it won’t, she’ll fix the suit before she lets herself sleep tonight), and even if no one blames her. She blames herself. 

“A week ago that belt stopped him from walking into a trap.” Okoye insists. “He would have been attacked by a team of at least twenty foreign agents, but he stopped in time. Surprised _them._ I will take a bullet graze over that.”

“I’ll take _neither.”_ Shuri says through grit teeth. Okoye looks at her with pursed lips, like she’s being unreasonable. Shuri feels she’s being extremely reasonable. Something bad has happened to her brother because of an error she made, that is an indisputable fact. But it’s always _do not blame yourself_ and _it could have been worse_ , all these meaningless comforts. 

Why can’t she be allowed to be upset? 

She asks herself that all night. Mother comes and says much of the same things Okoye had said, along with Nakia. T’Challa is apparently sleeping in a recovery unit of wherever he is, she still doesn’t even know, but she’s sure he’d say the same things. 

So she fixes the suit. Adds enough vibranium so that there aren’t any half-inch gaps, even overlays some. And then she puts on her shoes and walks back to the hut. 

Bucky isn’t asleep despite the hour. Shuri wonders if this is normal for him or if he’s been waiting this whole time, wondering what emergency befell them. Maybe gearing up to fight if there was an army marching on Wakanda. 

She sits at the table with him and eats a radish. He offers to cook it but she’s gotten into the habit of eating them raw even though it’s sort of gross and the juice drips all over her hands and all over the table. Bucky waits patiently and does not try to ask what happened.

“I hurt T’Challa.” Shuri finally says, her voice so hoarse she barely recognizes it. “Not directly and I didn’t mean to, obviously. But I did. I just--I hurt someone who I’ve only ever wanted to keep safe.”

Bucky looks at her with his small smile, but it’s soaked with melancholy. His eyes are both fixed on her and fixed on something far away at the same time. She wonders if he’s even seeing her.

“Yeah kid,” he says, “me too.”

That hangs in the air for awhile, Shuri unable to answer because nothing makes that better. She honestly can’t believe she just said that to him, to Bucky Barnes the man whose mind was stolen and whose body was hijacked to literally, physically, directly hurt people and now has to live with it. 

“Oh God,” Shuri can’t even think of how to apologize, “I’m so--I should not have--”

“It’s okay, kid.” Bucky puts a hand up to halt her fumbled outpouring of guilt. “You know why I like you, Shuri? Because everyone else I know always steps around the things I did so I don’t have to think about them, as if I’m not already. No one ever talks about their problems around me because they think I have enough of my own or something. You’ve never done that to me, so don’t start now.”

“You like me because I don’t treat you different?” Shuri repeats. “That’s why _I_ like _you._ ”

“I guess we were sorta meant to be friends then. Friends let you cry if you want to.”

Being told not to cry always makes her cry more, but being told that it’s alright to cry always makes her cry most. So she just does that. It isn’t embarrassing or awkward like she might’ve thought, because it doesn’t change things. He doesn’t try to console her or hug her or anything weird. He sits across from her at the table and eats a carrot, and while she cries he gets up and fills a cup with water from the basin and hands that to her, which makes her think the ridiculous thought that’s trying to replenish her of the water she’s losing in tears, which makes her laugh because it’s two in the morning and it’s _funny._

“What?” Bucky sounds genuinely lost, a bit concerned by her sudden mood swing. 

“Nothing.” She takes a sip of the water. “Everyone told me not to be upset about it. I couldn’t help it.”

“I started thinking about it like this: you can be as sad as you want about the things you’ve done wrong. Right? Because you can’t help that, like you said.” Bucky holds up a finger, points it in her direction. “But you fix it next time. Stop giving yourself reasons to be sad about it.”

No one ever tells her that. Shuri is pretty sure she’s literally never heard it before in her life.

“You do that?”

“I can’t take back what I did to Steve.” Bucky says bluntly. “And he doesn’t blame me, like your brother doesn’t blame you, but we still did it. I went back under so I could make sure it didn’t happen again. And you--?”

“Fixed the suit.”

“There you go.” His hand lands on her shoulder with steady weight and he squeezes lightly. “Anyone ever tell you you’re smart?”

She laughs. She thinks maybe she’s done crying for tonight. 

 

“Look,” T’Challa marches into her lab with his shirt hiked up, “it’s not even a graze. It’s a scrape.”

“Scrape and graze mean the same thing.” Shuri replies nonchalantly as she finishes screwing a wiring plate into place. She takes as much time as possible, making each movement ten times slower so T’Challa will have to stand there, in her lab, shirt raised on one side. 

She finally looks up and inspects the cut. It looks deep but seems to be healing nicely and all he has covering it is one single white sterile pad. Shuri gets the point. 

“I know you are alright. I just wish it never happened, that’s all.”

“I should have seen that shot coming before it even touched the suit.”

“Well that’s what the belt was for, but,” Shuri flashes him a grin on her way over to the computer, “didn’t really work out the way I thought.”

She sits in her computer chair and spins around to face the screen. Even with her back to T’Challa she can picture his face and feel his confusion. She knows what he was expecting--he was expecting her to be weepy and falling apart. And she _might_ have been, but Bucky had given her the valuable gift of validation last night and she’d woken up feeling alright. 

“You are a lot calmer than I thought you would be.” T’Challa echoes her assumptions. “But that is good. There is no reason to blame yourself when something happens just because you make the suit. No suit is impermeable, Shuri, and--”

“It was my fault.” She says, turning in her chair again to face him and now he looks _really_ confused. “And I’m sorry it happened. But I am not going to let it happen again.”

“But--”

Shuri interrupts by popping up from her chair and hugging him as tight as she can, which is fairly tight if the noise he makes is any indication. She hugs her brother like her life depends on it, and before he can ask anymore questions she says, “I love you, T’Challa.”

“I love you too.”

She pulls away but keeps a hand on his arm, ready to drag him across the lab. “Here’s what I did to the suit,”

 

“Sometimes Wilson will answer the phone when I call him, but he won’t say anything.” Bucky throws a handful of grain toward Sam the chicken with particular force, which of course Sam doesn’t register. “He just waits. It’s aggravating.”

“That sounds hilarious.”

“You and him would get along great. You should link up.”

“If you’re going to let me meet any of your friends, it has to be Bruce Banner.” She brushes her hands together and watches the dusty and crumbling grains from her hands fall to the dirt below them. Back to the planet. Shuri crouches down to lift the feed sack, which she can do now with limited problems, and starts the walk back to the hut before Bucky reaches out and tugs her sleeve.

“Wait one second.”

“Bucky my _arms_.”

“Then set it down ‘cause this is gonna take a minute.” 

She lets the bag slide from her grip and thud back to the ground. He sounds serious in a way that slightly unsettles her. When she steps back toward him, she sees that he’s holding a small rectangular photograph, apparently pulled from the pocket of his shorts. 

He flips it over so she can see. It’s black and white, depicting two soldiers that her brain doesn’t immediately realize are Steve Rogers and a young Bucky himself. They’re both grinning, Steve directly at the camera and Bucky in Steve’s direction, the edges of his face blurring from what she can guess was his quick movement. She wonders what they were saying at the time, if this snapshot captured them in the middle of a joke or a playful taunt. 

Patches of the grey background is smudging away into a pale yellow, a side effect of the natural oils on someone’s skin revisiting the picture over and over and over until it begins to fade. Bucky is smiling while she inspects it, a bigger smile than ever before. Maybe a record. 

“You look young.” She says finally, unsure of what else to say. 

“I was.” Bucky agrees. “Steve was too. I guess I realized that the other night was the first time I ever talked about Steve around you. Around anyone, really.”

“Yeah.”

“I think about him all the time. I thought about mentioning him to you so often but I always felt like it might upset you.”

Shuri, startled, blurts out immediately, “It wouldn’t!”

“Well, either way.” Bucky shrugs and looks at the photograph again, his thumb right over Steve’s chest. “You and him are so alike. It’s like I said before, Steve tries to hide his problems and his feelings on my behalf. Like,” he laughs breathily, “when I was going back under he was cracking jokes even though he looked like he was attending a damn funeral.”

Bucky looks up at her fixedly and adds, “I guess I’m saying all of this because you trusted me enough to tell me all your feelings. And no one has done that in a long time, so I’m--I’m trying to reciprocate.”

“Good. You know, scientifically, if you bottle all your feelings up it’ll kill you.”

Bucky laughs, actually genuinely laughs, and puts the photo back in his pocket. He brings his hand down on Shuri’s back and gives her a gentle push in the direction of the hut. “I’m glad I met you, kiddo.”

“I’m glad I met you too. Even if you--”

Then, in a moment that feels like history repeating itself, Shuri’s beads begin to vibrate. The same chilling continuous vibrating, and she starts to panic before she remembers all at once that T’Challa is _here._ He should be in a meeting right now, but that’s all. 

And then Shuri turns and looks at Bucky, who’s staring down at his own arm in concern. His beads are visibly vibrating too. 

Shuri takes a step back so that they’re side by side, and she knocks her beads against his until they both broadcast half of the same message. It’s a national news alert, something that’s programmed to go straight to every citizen’s Kimoyo beads if it’s deemed urgent enough by the algorithm. 

Shuri and Bucky both squint at the grainy, cell phone-shot footage of something large, round, and metal in a city street. Shuri reads the headline once, twice, three times, and Bucky must have read it too because he looks at her with confusion and asks, 

“What are the children of Thanos?”

**Author's Note:**

> i love bucky and shuri so much and i've been dying to write something about their friendship because i feel like they have So many similarities. im using this as my new ao3 account bc i want it to be Just marvel! my tumblr is @bi-thor if u want to talk or discuss marvel or whatever!!
> 
> also, shoutout to my friend em for being amazing. as always she reads my fics, points outs what works and what doesn't, and gives me ideas that make every fic i write stronger. go check her out on tumblr @lesbianmayparker


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